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Visiting Innovation Fellows

Engaging thought and action leaders to work directly with MIT scholars

The MIT Innovation Initiative engages thought and action leaders to work directly with MIT scholars to better understand the complex processes involved in taking innovation beyond invention to address urgent global problems. Visiting Innovation Fellows are drawn from policy, corporate, risk capital, and entrepreneurial settings, and interacts with the MIT community through convening events, lectures, and one-on-one sessions with student entrepreneurs and others seeking to engage more deeply with innovation practitioners.

Visting Innovation Fellows

Ash Carter Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and former Secretary of Defense (2017–present)

Bob Metcalfe ’68 Ethernet co-inventor and 3Com co-founder (2015–2016)

Deval Patrick Former Governor of Massachusetts (2014–2015)

Ash Carter (2017–present)

Ash Carter currently serves as the Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He also is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Most recently, Carter served as the 25th Secretary of Defense. For over thirty-five years inside government under presidents of both political parties as well as in the private sector, Ash Carter has leveraged his extraordinary experience in national security, technology and innovation to defend the United States and make a better world.

Carter served as Defense Secretary from 2015 to 2017. Leading the largest organization in the world with more than three million civilian and military employees and an annual budget of more than half a trillion dollars, Carter became known for his savvy leadership and for ensuring the Pentagon thought “outside its five-sided box.” At a time of global change and congressional gridlock, Carter transformed the way the Defense Department fought adversaries, stood with allies and partners, planned and budgeted, partnered with private enterprises, and managed its talent.

As Secretary, Carter advised President Obama and transformed the department’s strategic thinking and operations on critical global challenges and across the domains of armed conflict – not just sea and air and land, but also in space and cyberspace. He changed the trajectory of the military campaign to deliver ISIL a lasting defeat, coordinating a global coalition of dozens of nations, simultaneously conducting operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and beyond, and eliminating ISIL’s leaders and plotters. Carter also designed and executed the strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific, established the Defense Department and NATO’s new playbook for confronting Russia’s aggression, and launched the Defense Department’s latest cyber strategy.

At the same time Carter directed America’s global operations, he also spearheaded revolutionary improvements to the Defense Department. To develop new technological and operational capabilities, he pushed investments in research and development to nearly $72 billion dollars in the fiscal year 2017 budget alone. Carter also launched six transformative ‘Force of the Future’ initiatives to change the way the department recruits, trains, and retains quality people, and he also directed the opening of all military positions to women without exception. And to make the department more innovative, Carter created the Defense Digital Service to bring tech experts into the Pentagon for a tour of duty. He also opened Pentagon outposts in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, and other tech hubs to reconnect the government and military with visionary private sector leaders and companies, and established the Department’s first Defense Innovation Board, which attracted thought leaders such as Google Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt, astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and many more, as well as the Pentagon’s Chief Innovation Officer position. Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Carter served in the department’s number two and number three jobs.

As Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer from 2011 to 2013, he oversaw the department’s management and personnel and steered strategy and budget through the turmoil of sequester. As Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (ATL) from 2009 to 2011, Carter led the department’s procurement reform and innovation agenda, the successful completion of key procurements like the KC-46 tanker and the cancellation of unsuccessful programs like the presidential helicopter, rapid acquisitions (including the development of thousands of mine-resistant ambush protected “MRAP” vehicles that saved countless service members’ lives in Afghanistan and elsewhere), and global logistics for the largest enterprise on earth.

Earlier in his government career, Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1993 to 1996. He was responsible for the Nunn-Lugar program that removed and eliminated nuclear weapons in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, the military planning during the 1994 crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the Defense Department and on Capitol Hill during the Cold War, Carter was known for his work on missile defense and the then-Strategic Defense Initiative, as well as basing options for the MX Missile. Over the past three decades, Carter has also served on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board, and the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board.

In addition to his government service, Carter has taught at many of the world’s outstanding academic institutions. He has been a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a lecturer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. At Harvard’s Kennedy School from 1996 to 2009, Carter was a Professor of Science and International Affairs and Chair of the International & Global Affairs faculty. He served as a physics instructor at Oxford University, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and M.I.T., and an experimental research associate at Brookhaven and Fermilab National Laboratories. Secretary Carter is also author or co-author of 11 books and more than 100 articles on physics, technology, national security, and management.

Outside of government and the university, Carter was a Senior Executive at the Markle Foundation’s America-wide initiative to shape technology and trade strategies to enable all Americans to flourish in a networked global economy. Previously Carter was a Senior Partner of Global Technology Partners focused on advising major investment firms in technology, and an advisor on global affairs to Goldman Sachs. Carter has also served on the boards of the MITRE Corporation, Mitretek Systems, and Lincoln Laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and as a member of the Draper Laboratory Corporation. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Aspen Strategy Group. Currently, Secretary Carter is member of Delta Airline’s Board of Directors and will advise the MITRE Corporation and Lincoln Laboratories on technology matters.

For his government service, Secretary Carter has been awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the department’s highest civilian honor, on five separate occasions, and he twice received the Joint Distinguished Service Medal from the Chairman and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Secretary Carter earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history, summa cum laude, at Yale University, where he was also awarded Phi Beta Kappa; and he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

A native of Philadelphia, he is married to Stephanie Carter and has two grown children.